The Optimist's Daughter

Faulkner House.  Image via

When I was in New Orleans last month, I took myself to a couple of bookstores in the French Quarter.  I love visiting bookstores on vacation, they really seem to stick in my mind.  One was Arcadian books, a frickin' tangle of books that felt like an avalanche was going to fall on me at any moment (which is not to say that I didn't love it) and the other was Faulkner House Books, in the same house where William Faulkner lived (both bookstores are near the cathedral). It is small and extremely civilized, it has the size of a fabulous private library, and for a few precious moments I had it to myself until a small crowd of maybe four people came in, making it almost unbearable.  However, I did overhear an amazing exchange between customer and proprietor that went something like this:

"I'm trying to remember the name of an author..."
"Hum me a few bars," she said. How charming is that?
"Well, he's a young man..."
"Black or white?"
"Black..."
and she gestured at a book on the shelf behind her...
"That's him!" 
Amazing.

I picked up a Eudora Welty, looking for something southern and New Orleans-related - The Optimist's Daughter, something I'd never heard of, but was pleasantly surprised to see had won the Pulitzer.  It's a quiet, short (180 pages) book about a woman, Lauren who has returned to her home just outside New Orleans while her dad has surgery. She's been living in Chicago after attending the Art Institute (hey, just like me!).  Her dad has married a young woman, maybe the same age or younger than Lauren, who's not as sophisticated or respected as Lauren's deceased mother. Her dad dies unexpectedly, and Lauren goes through the funeral and goes home, The End.  I could really relate to the hospital and funeral scenes, in which people say and do stupid things, but Lauren just suffers through.  Actually, Welty gives few details about Lauren's interiority and I was really struck by how little access I had to the main character's interior voice and thoughts. Lately I've mostly been reading contemporary literature and it was a real change to experience something written 40 years ago.  I've read most of the Pulitzer Prize winning fiction books since the 90s and I was really quite surprised that this ostensibly simple narrative tale won in 1973.  It's amazing how literature tastes have changed in the last half century.  But, actually, it wasn't a simple story, after some reflection. As Lauren floats through encounters with her hometown community, they prattle on around her and she says very little. What made it fun as a reader was to imagine how Lauren might have felt about the absurd things people were saying because she was too polite or tired to respond.  It's with a deft and delicate hand that Welty wrote this little novel, a real pleasure to read.